The World-Wide Web (WWW) operates over the Internet infrastructure, enabling services such as email, web browsing, online shopping and the like. The Internet primarily provides data services to users, for example, the ability to create and personalize a website/webpage, online shopping, accessing web services, and the like. The Internet network has also been used to transmit voice and has become a parallel telecommunications network providing voice communication services through voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).
However, the information available on the Internet is not readily available to people who do not have computers or who cannot access the Internet through digital infrastructure. In typical telecommunication based networks, service providers offer basic data services such as short message service (SMS), email, sports updates, news, and the like. A disadvantage of the current telecommunication service is the limitation of an end-users' ability to provide such data services, as many users' do not have the control or ability to provide such applications. There is a need for an infrastructure that would enable a user, for example a telephone user, to provide and control data services to other telephone users.
Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) is a markup language for creating voice user interfaces that use automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis and is described, for example, at http://www.voicexml.org, http://www.vxml.org, http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20/ and elsewhere. VoiceXML has tags that instruct the voice browser to provide speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, dialog management, and audio playback.